dannyman.toldme.com

Work Around Work Around

A software person reflects on the Self:

Tagging a bug “Won’t Fix” doesn’t mean it isn’t real and it doesn’t mean nobody noticed; it means the cost of fixing it exceeds the benefit, or the fix would introduce worse instabilities elsewhere, or the system has already built so many dependencies around the bug that it’s become, functionally, a feature. Every codebase of sufficient age accumulates these. They’re documented, acknowledged, and largely left alone so the engineers can go build something useful.

Note (and this is important): you are a codebase of sufficient age.

[…]

Won’t Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you’re trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be. Your distractibility is a bug in the “focused knowledge worker” spec but might be a feature in the “person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly” spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won’t Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.

Joan Westenberg
“Won’t Fix” Self Help

I remember a quote I can’t find, the gist of which was that “prior to the advent of modern psychology, people’s personality disorders were just their personalities.” Older folks are unlikely to “rewrite” their core functionality, but you can tweak around the surfaces of the system to ensure better compatibility. We can also learn not to take other folks’ unintuitive quirks personally.

I have long noticed that I am interested in things for somewhere between three days to three months at a time before my interests move elsewhere. The light of my attention blinks in and out, so I try to bring it around like a lighthouse in hopes that the various ships can course correct before they crash into the boulders.

Anyway, even if you’re not going to rewrite your Being from scratch, you can always work at experimenting with new features. I know some folks like to try a new idea for a month at a time, and evaluate whether this new could-be habit is worth trying to perpetuate. One month is a decent time to road test an idea and also to begin forming a habit, if that is a habit you want to have.